5 Ways AI Aimed to Improve the World in 2021

Not so long ago, searching for information could lead to a library to scan endless volumes or even tediously sift through microfilm. Clearly, technology is making the world a better place.

Scientists, researchers, developers and companies have been on a quest to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Only now they’re accelerating their efforts by putting NVIDIA GPU-driven AI to work.

And the benefits can be seen across critical global issues such as COVID-19 and climate change, to education and employment. Below is just some of the amazing work of 2021.

Accelerating COVID-19 Research

In 2021, medical researchers were able to accelerate vaccine discovery results to months instead of years. Advances in NVIDIA GPUs, AI and specialized software helped find the way.

Many played a part. Leading research institutions began harnessing NVIDIA GPUs to drive their work in cryo-electron microscopy, a technique used to study the structure of molecules — such as the spike proteins on the COVID-19 virus — and accelerate drug and vaccine discovery.

Highlighting this technological shift, four teams used NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI platforms to win spots as finalists for a Gordon Bell award or a special Gordon Bell prize for COVID research.

Modeling Climate Change 

Scientists are modeling climate change. As polar caps melt, one recent effort aims to predict sea ice loss. But what if you could accurately model the entire Earth’s change over time, using physics-based models and high-resolution graphics to show regional changes?

NVIDIA at GTC shared plans for creating a digital twin of Earth in Omniverse. The effort promises the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer, Earth-2, dedicated to forecasting the impacts of climate change.

With extreme weather events on the rise, climate-related disasters are increasingly threatening property and lives.

Speeding Disaster Detection

For the 2021 wildfire season in the U.S., the total damage and cumulative economic loss is predicted to be between $70 billion and $90 billion, according to AccuWeather. And floods cause more than $40 billion in damages worldwide a year, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The human toll, in lives lost and livelihoods upended, has been devastating as well.

Flood detection models can help people in threatened zones evacuate to safety in time during heavy rains. Fire detection AI can help stop the spread of fires, prevent further air pollution and loss of trees and homes.

Creating Employment Equity 

The United Nations, citing the impact of technological advances on the labor market, has helped developed a strategy on the future of work that sets goals for decent and inclusive growth in work.

Data science startup Sama is committed to creating employment opportunities for underserved communities. The company’s market-leading data annotation platform, accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs, gives its customers an opportunity to partner with a socially responsible business and work with underserved communities.

 

Sama has about 4,000 employees with benefits working from East Africa to support its platform.

In addition to the social benefits of helping reduce inequality, Sama aims to address data bias. Creating diverse datasets can help ensure that AI models can be trained so that features work for everyone, helping mitigate risks for companies deploying them.

Helping Teach Students

Younger generations need to develop the skills, especially in STEM fields, to tackle these challenges. AI can help.

For example, U.S. math students rank 31st in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To improve classroom engagement, a research team backed by the National Science Foundation has been developing AI to assist math teachers.

The effort has been tested in Colorado public schools, where it uses AI to analyze teachers’ use of discussion techniques as well as students’ responses. The AI-driven software offers instructors feedback that they can use for follow-up.

Separately, students are also learning AI. NVIDIA and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania are partnering on an effort to bring hands-on AI education to youth in clubs across the U.S. Among the first to adopt the program is the Boys & Girls Clubs of Hudson County, where students this summer learned how to build AI projects to aid Alzheimer’s patients and monitor pedestrian safety using NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB developer kits.

The school teaching aid and the Boys & Girls program are just a few of the examples displaying AI’s promise as a positive impact on education.

The post 5 Ways AI Aimed to Improve the World in 2021 appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

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2021 Year in Review: Google Quantum AI

Google’s Quantum AI team has had a productive 2021. Despite ongoing global challenges, we’ve made significant progress in our effort to build a fully error-corrected quantum computer, working towards our next hardware milestone of building an error-corrected quantum bit (qubit) prototype. At the same time, we have continued our commitment to realizing the potential of quantum computers in various applications. That’s why we published results in top journals, collaborated with researchers across academia and industry, and expanded our team to bring on new talent and expertise.

An update on hardware

The Quantum AI team is determined to build an error-corrected quantum computer within the next decade, and to simultaneously use what we learn along the way to deliver helpful—and even transformational—quantum computing applications. This long-term commitment is expanded broadly into three key questions for our quantum hardware:

  1. Can we demonstrate that quantum computers can outperform the classical supercomputers of today in a specific task? We demonstrated beyond-classical computation in 2019.
  2. Can we build a prototype of an error-corrected qubit? In order to use quantum computers to their full potential, we will need to realize quantum error correction to overcome the noise that is present during our computations. As a key step in this direction, we aim to realize the primitives of quantum error correction by redundantly encoding quantum information across several physical qubits, demonstrating that such redundancy leads to an improvement over using individual physical qubits. This is our current target.
  3. Can we build a logical qubit which does not have errors for an arbitrarily long time? Logical qubits encode information redundantly across several physical qubits, and are able to reduce the impact of noise on the overall quantum computation. Putting together a few thousand logical qubits would allow us to realize the full potential of quantum computers for various applications.
An interactive map of our journey to build an error-corrected quantum computer.

An interactive map of our journey to build an error-corrected quantum computer

Progress toward building an error-corrected qubit prototype

The distance between the noisy quantum computers of today and the fully error-corrected quantum computers of the future is vast. In 2021, we made significant progress in closing this gap by working toward building a prototype logical qubit whose errors are smaller than those of the physical qubits on our chips.

This work requires improvements across the entire quantum computing stack. We have made chips with better qubits, improved the methods that we use to package these chips to better connect them with our control electronics, and developed techniques to calibrate large chips with several dozens of qubits simultaneously.

These improvements culminated in two key results. First, we are now able to reset our qubits with high fidelity, allowing us to reuse qubits in quantum computations. Second, we have realized mid-circuit measurement that allows us to keep track of computation within quantum circuits. Together, the high-fidelity resets and mid-circuit measurements were used in our recent demonstration of exponential suppression of bit and phase flip errors using repetition codes, resulting in 100x suppression of these errors as the size of the code grows from 5 to 21 qubits.

Chart chronicling repetition code

Suppression of logical errors as the number of qubits in the repetition code is increased. As we increase the code size from 5 to 21 qubits, we see 100x reduction in logical. Image acknowledgement: Kevin Satzinger/Google Quantum AI

Repetition codes, an error correction tool, enable us to trade-off between resources (more qubits) and performance (lower error) which will be central in guiding our hardware research and development going forward. This year we showed how error decreases as we increase the number of included qubits for a 1-dimensional code. We are currently running experiments to extend these results to two-dimensional surface codes which will correct errors more comprehensively.

Applications of quantum computation

In addition to building quantum hardware, our team is also looking for clear margins of quantum advantage in real world applications. With our collaborators in academia and industry, we are exploring fields where quantum computers can provide significant speedups, with realistic expectations that error-corrected quantum computers will likely require better than quadratic speedups for meaningful improvements.

As always, our collaborations with academic and industry partners were invaluable in 2021. One notable collaboration with Caltech showed that, under certain conditions, quantum machines can learn about physical systems from exponentially fewer experiments than what is conventionally required. This novel method was validated experimentally using 40 qubits and 1300 quantum operations, demonstrating a substantial quantum advantage even with the noisy quantum processors we have today. This paves the way to more innovation in quantum machine learning and quantum sensing, with potential near-term use cases.

In collaboration with researchers at Columbia University, we combined one of the most powerful techniques for chemical simulation, Quantum Monte Carlo, with quantum computation. This approach surpasses previous methods as a promising quantum approach to ground state many-electron calculations, which are critical in creating new materials and understanding their chemical properties. When we run a component of this technique on a real quantum computer, we are able to double the size of prior calculations without sacrificing accuracy of the measurements, even in the presence of noise on a device with up to 16 qubits. The resilience of this method to noise is an indication of its potential for scalability even on today’s quantum computers.

We continue to study how quantum computers can be used to simulate quantum physical phenomena—as was most recently reflected in our experimental observation of a time crystal on a quantum processor (Ask a Techspert: What exactly is a time crystal?). This was a great moment for theorists, who’ve pondered the possibility of time crystals for nearly a century. In other work, we also explored the emergence of quantum chaotic dynamics by experimentally measuring out-of-time-ordered correlations on one of our quantum computers, which was done jointly with collaborators at the NASA Ames Research Center; and experimentally measuring the entanglement entropy of the ground state of the Toric code Hamiltonian by creating its eigenstates using shallow quantum circuits with collaborators at the Technical University of Munich.

Our collaborators contributed to, and even inspired, some of our most impactful research in 2021. Quantum AI remains committed to discovering and realizing meaningful quantum applications in collaboration with scientists and researchers from across the world in 2022 and beyond as we continue our focus on machine learning, chemistry, and many-body quantum physics.

You can find a list of all our publications here.

Continuing investment in the quantum computing ecosystem

This year, at Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O, we reaffirmed our commitment to the roadmap and investments required to make a useful quantum computer within the decade. While we were busy growing in Santa Barbara, we also continue to support the enablement of researchers in the quantum community through our open source software. Our quantum programming framework, Cirq, continues to improve with contributions from the community. 2021 also saw the release of specialized tools in collaboration with partners in the ecosystem. Two examples of these are:

  • The release of a new Fermionic Quantum Simulator for quantum chemistry applications in collaboration with QSimulate, taking advantage of the symmetry in quantum chemistry problems to provide efficient simulations.
  • A significant upgrade to qsim which allows for simulation of noisy quantum circuits on high performance processors such as GPUs via Google Cloud, and qsim integration with NVIDIA’s cuQuantum SDK to enable qsim users to make the most of NVIDIA GPUs when developing quantum algorithms and applications.

We also released an open-source tool called stim, which provides a 10000x speedup when simulating error correction circuits.

You can access our portfolio of open-source software here.

Looking toward 2022

Resident quantum scientist Qubit the Dog taking part in a holiday sing-along.

Resident quantum scientist Qubit the Dog taking part in a holiday sing-along led by team members Jimmy Chen and Ofer Naaman.

Through teamwork, collaboration, and some innovative science, we are excited about the progress that we have seen in 2021. We have big expectations for 2022 as we focus on progressing through our hardware milestones, the discovery of new quantum algorithms, and the realization of quantum applications on the quantum processors of today. To tackle our difficult mission, we are growing our team, building on our existing network of collaborators, and expanding our Santa Barbara campus. Together with the broader quantum community, we are excited to see the progress that quantum computing makes in 2022 and beyond.

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Innovation Inspiration: 5 Startup Stories From NVIDIA Inception in 2021

NVIDIA Inception is one of the largest startup ecosystems in the world — and its thousands of members achieved impressive feats in 2021, bringing AI and data science to an array of industries.

NVIDIA Inception nurtures cutting-edge AI, data science and HPC startups with go-to-market support, expertise and technology. This year, the program surpassed 9,000 members — about two-thirds of the total number of AI startups in the world, as estimated by Pitchbook.

Inception members worldwide are using AI to detect and monitor wildfires, power checkout-free refreshment stands at stadiums, predict car crashes, monitor utility poles and sort recyclables.

Here are some of the stories shared in 2021 by NVIDIA Inception companies doing breakthrough work in different industries:

Agriculture: Greeneye Cuts Chemicals, Costs for Farmers

Tel Aviv startup Greeneye is developing AI for precision spraying of crops, reducing use of herbicides by as much as 90 percent. Its system uses the NVIDIA Jetson platform to target herbicides on individual weeds in milliseconds, decreasing water and soil contamination. The company is working with corn and soybean farmers in the midwest U.S. to deploy its AI-driven smart sprayers on tractors.

Automotive: Plus Revs Up Autonomous Trucks

Self-driving truck company Plus, based in Silicon Valley, is building an autonomous vehicle platform that can be retrofitted to existing trucks or added to new vehicles by manufacturers. A software-defined system built on NVIDIA DRIVE Orin, the PlusDrive platform uses lidar, radar and cameras to gather data about a truck’s surroundings, plan its course and control the vehicle.

Healthcare: Peptone Powers Protein Engineering

U.K.-based Peptone has developed a protein drug discovery engine that helps scientists find protein variants with promising therapeutic properties. The startup uses generative AI models and complex simulations running on NVIDIA DGX A100 GPUs to model unstructured proteins, which are involved in cancer, inflammatory diseases and neurodegenerative diseases.

Public Sector: Fotokite Supports First Responders 

Fotokite, based in Zurich, used the NVIDIA Jetson platform to build an autonomous tethered drone that gives first responders an aerial perspective during fires, search-and-rescue missions or medical emergencies. The system’s thermal camera can help firefighters locate hotspots that need attention, find the safest location to enter or exit a structure, and guide firefighters on whether their hoses are targeting the right points.

Retail: Heartdub Drives Sustainable Fashion

Beijing-based Heartdub digitizes textiles and uses AI to simulate how clothes look on the human body, enabling creators to display and verify designs virtually. Its physics engine, which takes advantage of NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs and NVIDIA HDR InfiniBand networking, can lessen the number of physical samples needed, reduce waste from excess fabric and minimize unsold inventory.

Read more startup stories and join NVIDIA Inception.

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GFN Thursday Says ‘GGs’ to 2021 With Our Community’s Top Titles of the Year

It’s the final countdown for what’s been a big year for cloud gaming. For the last GFN Thursday of the year, we’re taking a look at some of the GeForce NOW community’s top picks of games that joined the GeForce NOW library in 2021.

Plus, check out the last batch of games coming to the cloud this year, with seven new additions streaming this week.

Bringing Gaming to Gamers

This year, the GeForce NOW library has reached over 1,100 PC games streaming on the service, including nearly 100 free-to-play options. Plus, new titles come to the cloud every GFN Thursday, meaning more players can play more games that they own.

Whether they’re playing on underpowered PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, SHIELD TVs, Android devices, iPhones or iPads, there’s a PC game for every player to stream instantly from this ever-expanding library — at legendary GeForce levels of performance.

Pumped Up Picks 

To round out a year full of great gaming and new title additions, the GeForce NOW community shared some of their picks to play on the cloud.

Members are having a blast strapping on Star-Lord’s boots for an original adventure in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and have shared their love for the game.

“Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy looks absolutely stunning on GeForce NOW,” said DrSpaceman. “The colorful, alien worlds are so vibrant with RTX ON and the game plays like a dream.”

“Playing this game on the 3080 tier is just beautiful,” said Bill from NerdNest.tv. “The art direction is top notch.”

Gamers are also delighted to befriend charming spirit companions and enjoy a rich tale in Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and thrilled to overthrow a corrupt government in Far Cry 6.

“Kena: Bridge of Spirits was by far one of my favorite games, due to the graphics, visuals and the storyline,” said VetCloudGaming. “The visuals were amazing and reminded me of a film.”

For fun with friends, players are squading up to explore, build, craft and battle in the MMO New World or become the Vikings they were born to be in Valheim.

“New World has to be the biggest surprise game of the year,” said Marchief from Cloud Gaming Xtreme. “So many people wanted it, and now it’s on GeForce NOW.”

If stretching 2021 to include an extra month from the end of last year — members are taking Cyberpunk 2077 to the next level with cinematic quality by turning RTX ON for a glamorous game and gritty story.

Other games we’ve seen mentioned frequently include PowerWash Simulator and Gas Station Simulator for entertaining scenarios with wacky outcomes. Games like No Man’s Sky and Icarus are popular options for those looking for a challenge to explore and survive. And members wanting to become an unstoppable warrior should try Warframe for a sci-fi, story-driven, free-to-play game.

The Power to Play With GeForce RTX 3080

Another big win for GeForce NOW members this year is the ability to play all of these titles using the newest generation of cloud gaming with a GeForce NOW RTX 3080 membership.

RTX 3080 memberships turn nearly any device into a gaming rig capable of streaming at up to 1440p resolution and 120 frames per second on PCs, native 1440p or 1600p at 120 FPS on Macs, and 4K HDR at 60 FPS on SHIELD TV, with ultra-low latency that goes head-to-head with many local gaming experiences.

It also comes with the longest gaming session length available of eight hours, full control to customize in-game graphics settings, as well as RTX ON rendering environments in cinematic quality for supported games.

Besides powering up your ultimate cloud gaming experience on GeForce NOW, for a limited time, get the gift of a copy of Crysis Remastered free with the purchase of an RTX 3080 membership or six-month Priority membership. Terms and conditions apply.

End Games for 2021

NARAKA: BLADEPOINT on GeForce NOW
Battle it out with the best using martial-arts-inspired melee combat and get hooked onto NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, now supported on Epic Games Store.

The following seven titles come to the cloud this week to close out a year packed full of gaming:

We make every effort to launch games on GeForce NOW as close to their release as possible, but, in some instances, games may not be available immediately.

Stay tuned and look out for new announcements at CES to see how we’re kicking off 2022. Tell us what you want to see next for GeForce NOW on Twitter or in the comments below.

The post GFN Thursday Says ‘GGs’ to 2021 With Our Community’s Top Titles of the Year appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.

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AI Podcast Wrapped: Top Five Episodes of 2021

Recognized as one of tech’s top podcasts, the NVIDIA AI Podcast is approaching 3 million listens in five years, as it sweeps across topics like robots, data science, computer graphics and renewable energy.

Its 150+ episodes reinforce the extraordinary capabilities of AI — from diagnosing disease to boosting creativity to helping save the Earth — while focusing on the people behind the magic.

Here are our most-played episodes from 2021:

NVIDIA’s Liila Torabi Talks the New Era of Robotics Through Isaac Sim

Robots aren’t limited to the assembly line. Liila Torabi, senior product manager for Isaac Sim, a robotics and AI simulation platform powered by NVIDIA Omniverse, talks about where the field’s headed.

GANTheftAuto: Harrison Kinsley on AI-Generated Gaming Environments

Humans playing games against machines is nothing new, but now computers can develop their own games for people to play. Programming enthusiast and social media influencer Harrison Kinsley created GANTheftAuto, an AI-based neural network that generates a playable chunk of the classic video game Grand Theft Auto V.

Jules Anh Tuan Nguyen Explains How AI Lets Amputee Control Prosthetic Hand, Video Games

With deep learning, amputees can now control their prosthetics by simply thinking through the motion.

Jules Anh Tuan Nguyen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota’s biomedical engineering department, speaks about his efforts to allow amputees to control their prosthetic limb — right down to the finger motions — with their minds.

Matt Ginsberg Built a GPU-Powered Crossword Solver to Take on Top Word Nerds

Dr.Fill, the crossword puzzle-playing AI created by Matt Ginsberg — serial entrepreneur, pioneering AI researcher and former research professor — scored higher than any humans earlier this year at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

GE’s Danielle Merfeld and Arvind Rangarajan on AI and Renewable Energy

At GE Renewable Energy, CTO Danielle Merfeld and technical leader Arvind Rangarajan are focused on  advancing renewable energy. They cover how the company uses AI and a human-in-the-loop process to make renewable energy more widespread.

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It Was a Really Virtual Year: Top Five NVIDIA Videos of 2021

What better way to look back at NVIDIA’s top five videos of 2021 than to hop into the cockpit of a virtual plane flying over Taipei.

That was how NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher and Manuvir Das invited viewers into their COMPUTEX keynote on May 31. Their aircraft sailed over the city’s green hills and banked around its tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, on the wings of Microsoft Flight Sim running on an NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU.

It was a fitting start to one of the world’s largest annual tech gatherings, and one of the many virtual events in the second year of the COVID pandemic.

GeForce RTX and AI at COMPUTEX

In the keynote (below), Fisher unveiled our latest flagship gaming GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the latest games it brings to life with features like ray tracing.

Das revealed new ways to access enterprise AI through subscriptions to NVIDIA Base Command in the cloud and the growing lineup of NVIDIA Certified Systems, many of which are available from partners based in Taiwan.

Omniverse Enterprise and Research at SIGGRAPH

A history of computer graphics packed into less than two minutes of video narrated by Alvy Ray Smith, the computer scientist who co-founded Pixar and helped pioneer animated movies, introduced an Aug. 10 special address at SIGGRAPH.

Richard Kerris, vice president of Omniverse platform development, launched NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, an environment where companies from Adobe to Zoom can create virtual worlds and digital twins.

Sanja Fidler, senior director of AI research at NVIDIA, walked viewers through a grab bag of research projects including software to create your personal avatar in real time.

Making of a Kitchen Keynote

In his SIGGRAPH talk, Kerris showed a clip giving a behind-the-scenes look at how NVIDIA used Omniverse to make CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote in April.

The full 30+ minute mini-documentary (below) debuted at SIGGRAPH and was one of our most popular outtakes from 2021, viewed nearly 1.5 million times. It’s the story of how 34 artists, 15 researchers and 21 Jensens made magic in Omniverse.

A Three-Chip Company

The content of that GTC keynote included a fair amount of its own tech fireworks.

In declaring NVIDIA a “three-chip company,” Huang announced the NVIDIA Grace CPU, for building what he called “giant scale-out” AI and high performance computing systems; the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU for networking; and NVIDIA DRIVE Atlan for autonomous vehicles.

With those headliners, as well as new software stacks for conversational AI, recommender systems, networking, security and more, it’s no wonder the talk (below) was viewed more than 2.2 million times.

Digital Twins and Avatars

In retrospect, it was a year of digital twins and virtual worlds. So, it was fitting that one of our most memorable moments was the debut of Toy Jensen, a character based on our CEO, brought to life by NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar.

Toy Jensen hit the stage in the November GTC keynote (below). It’s work that will animate tomorrow’s smart retail shops and drive-throughs and even smart cars, thanks to NVIDIA DRIVE Concierge.

In his talk, our very real CEO also described a new supercomputer we’ll build called NVIDIA Earth-2, to advance climate science.

“I can’t imagine a greater and more important use” for all the technologies NVIDIA has created, Huang said.

Q&A With Toy Jensen

And just for fun, here’s a short Q&A with Toy Jensen.

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